The Tragedy of Linux: You Can Hack an OS, But You Can't Hack People

I've been promising a follow-up to Ubuntu is not Linux. Because the broad point that I'm trying to make needs to be hammered down, I will explain it again and again and again, more and more clearly each time.

Why is this idea so apparently hard for others to grasp and so nose-on-my-face evident to me? Perhaps I'm more socialized than my geek peers. I took a psychology course once. I've always been fascinated by sociology and culture studies. And I worked a couple years in my youth as a taxi driver. You find out all kinds of things about people that you wouldn't otherwise. Perhaps it is this forbidden fruit of knowledge of human nature that puts such a gulf between me and the geek world. I balance my computer knowledge with my people knowledge, while other geeks stay more exclusively computer-knowledge.

Of all the responses I got, probably the one that came the closest to showing understanding is - are you ready for this? - this post at ITWire! Titled "Linux winds of change: friction between Ubuntu and old guard", the author, Stan Beer, at least earns a B in grasping this slippery concept. He correctly understands these points:

More in Tux Machines

Jessie Release Date: 2015-04-25

We now have a target release date of Saturday the 25th of April. We
have checked with core teams, and this seems to be acceptable for
everyone. This means we are able to begin the final preparations for
a release of Debian 8 - "Jessie".
The intention is only to lift the date if something really critical
pops up that is not possible to handle as an errata, or if we end up
technically unable to release that weekend.
Please keep in mind that we intend to have a quiet period from
Saturday the 18th of April. Bug fixes must be *in Jessie* before
then.

Before ending out March, here's some new OpenGL Linux benchmarks comparing the closed-source Catalyst 15.3 Beta driver against the Linux 4.0 development kernel with Mesa 10.6 Git for the freshest open-source graphics driver code.

5 questions to determine if open source is a good fit for a software project

A benefit of open source in general, and commercial open source in particular, is that you have the support of others as well as the ability to do the maintenance yourself.
I hope these questions will help you determine whether open source is a good fit for your next software project. Let me know if there are other questions you would add to this list.

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